CHAPTER FIVE - The Fourth Initiation . . . The Crucifixion - Part 2

We have seen that one of the
factors responsible for the sin-complex of the West has been the development of
the mind faculty, with its consequent aftermath of a developed conscience, a
capacity to have a sense of values, and (as the result of that) the ability to
see the higher and the lower natures in opposition to each other. When the
higher self with its values and its range of contacts is instinctively
contacted, and the lower self, with its lesser values and its more material
range of activities is also realised, it necessarily follows that a sense of
division and of failure is developed; men realise their lack of achievement;
they become aware of God and humanity, of the world, of the flesh and the
devil, but at the same time of the kingdom of God. As man develops, his
definitions alter, and the crude so-called sins of the unevolved man, and the
faults and failings of the average "nice" citizen of modern times
involve different attitudes of mind and judgment, and surely different punitive
approaches. As our sense of God changes and develops, and as we approach nearer
to reality, our entire outlook upon life, ourselves and our fellowmen is apt to
alter and widen, and become more divine as well as more human. It is a human [197] characteristic to be conscious of sin, and to realise
that when a man has offended he must, in some form or other, pay a price. The
germ of mind, even in infant humanity, gives rise to this realisation, but it
took nearly two thousand years of Christianity to raise sin to a position of
such importance that it occupied (as it still does) a primary place in the
thought of the entire race. We have a situation wherein the law and the Church
and the educators of the race are almost entirely occupied with sin and how to
prevent it. One wonders sometimes what the world would have been like today if
the exponents of the Christian faith had occupied themselves with the theme of
love and loving service instead of with this constantly reiterated emphasis
upon the blood sacrifice and upon the wickedness of man.

The theme of sin runs
naturally and normally throughout human history; and the effort to expiate it,
in the form of animal sacrifice, has always been present. The belief in an
angry deity, who exacted penalties for all that was done by man against a
brother, and who demanded a price for all that was given to man as a product of
the natural processes of the earth, is as old as man himself. It has passed
through many phases. The idea of a God Whose nature is love has battled for
centuries with the idea of a God Whose nature is wrath. The outstanding
contribution of Christ to world progress was His affirmation, through word and
example, of the thought that God is love and not a wrathful deity, inflicting
jealous retribution. The battle still rages between this ancient belief and the
truth of God's love which Christ expressed, and which Shri Krishna also
embodied. But the belief in an angry, jealous God is still strongly entrenched.
It is rooted in the consciousness of the race, and only today are we slowly
beginning to realise a different expression of divinity. Our interpretation of
sin and its penalty has been at fault, but the reality of God's love can now be
grasped and can thus offset the disastrous doctrine of an angry God Who sent
His Son to be the propitiation for the world evil. Of this [198] belief Calvinism is perhaps the best and purest
interpretation, and a brief statement as to that theological doctrine will
present the concept in understandable terms.

"Calvinism is built upon
the dogma of the absolute sovereignty of God, including omnipotence,
omniscience and eternal justice—a common Christian doctrine, but developed by
Calvinists with relentless logic to extreme conclusions. Calvinism is often
summarised in five points. (1) Every human being as a descendant of Adam (whom
all Christians in those times supposed to be an historical character) is guilty
from his birth of original sin, in addition to later sins committed in his own
lifetime. A man can do nothing to remove his own sin and guilt; that can only
be done by the grace of God, mercifully vouchsafed to him through the atonement
of Christ, and without any merit whatever on his own part; (2) So only those
certain persons can be saved (particular redemption); (3) To whom God gives an
effectual calling, strengthening their wills, and enabling them to accept
salvation; (4) Who shall, and who shall not be saved is thus a matter of divine
election, or predestination; (5) God will never fail those who are his elect:
they shall never fall from ultimate salvation (perseverance of the saints).
Calvinists insisted with great heat, and endeavoured with much subtility to
demonstrate, that their doctrine fully provides for human freedom, and that God
is in no way responsible for human sin." [ccvi]28

In view, therefore, of this
emphasis upon human sinfulness, and as a result of the age-old habit of
offering sacrifice to God, the true mission of Christ was long ignored. Instead
of His being recognised as embodying in Himself an eternal hope for the race,
He was incorporated into the ancient system of sacrifices, and the ancient
habits of thought were too strong for the new idea which He came to give. Sin
and sacrifice ousted and supplanted the love and service which He sought to
bring to our attention through His life and His words. That is also why, from
the psychological angle, Christianity has produced such sad, weary, and
sin-conscious men. Christ, the sacrifice for sin, and the Cross of Christ as the
[199] instrument of His death, have absorbed men's
attention, whilst Christ the perfect man and Christ the Son of God have been
less emphasised. The cosmic significance of the cross has been entirely
forgotten (or never known) in the West.

Salvation is not primarily
connected with sin. Sin is a symptom of a condition, and when a man is
"truly saved" that condition is offset, and with it the incidental
sinful nature. It was this that Christ came to do—to show us the nature of the
"saved" life; to demonstrate to us the quality of the eternal Self
which is in every man; this is the lesson of the Crucifixion and the
Resurrection: the lower nature must die in order that the higher may be
manifested, and the eternal immortal soul in every man must rise from the tomb
of matter. It is interesting to trace the idea that men must suffer in this
world as the result of sin. In the East, where the doctrines of reincarnation
and of karma hold sway, a man suffers for his own deeds and sins and
"works out his own salvation, with fear and trembling." [ccvii]29
In the Jewish teaching a man suffers for the sins of his forebears and of his
nation, and thus gives substance to a truth which is only today beginning to be
a known fact—the truth of physical inheritance. Under the Christian teaching,
Christ, the perfect man, suffers with God, because God so loved the world that,
immanent in it as He is, He could not divorce Himself from the consequences of
human frailty and ignorance. Thus humanity gives a purpose to pain, and thus
evil is eventually defeated.

The thought and idea of
sacrifice for the sins of the people was not the original and basic idea.
Originally, infant humanity offered sacrifices to God to appease His wrath,
displayed in the elements through storms and earthquakes and physical
disasters. When, instinctively, men turned on each other, when they offended
and hurt one another, and so transgressed a dimly sensed realisation of human
relationships and intercourse, sacrifice was offered again to God so that He
too would not hurt mankind. Thus little by little [200] the idea grew until, at last, the salvation concept
might be briefly summarised in the following terms:

1. Men are saved from the
wrath of God in natural phenomena through animal sacrifices, preceded in still
more ancient times by the sacrifice of the fruits of the earth.

2. Men are saved from God's
wrath and from each other by the sacrifice of that which is valued, leading
eventually to human sacrifices.

3. Men are saved by the sacrifice
of a recognised Son of God, hence the vicarious atonement, for which the many
crucified world Saviours prepared the way for Christ.

4. Men are definitely saved
from eternal punishment for their sins by the death of Christ upon the Cross,
the sinner guilty of an unkind word being as much responsible for the death of
Christ as the vilest murderer.

5. Finally, the gradually
emerging recognition that we are saved by the living risen Christ—historically
presenting to us a goal, and present in each of us as the eternal omniscient
soul of man.

Today it is the risen Christ
who is emerging into the forefront of men's consciousness, and because of this
we are on our way towards a period of greater spirituality and a truer
expression of religion than at any other time in the history of man. The
religious consciousness is the persistent expression of the indwelling
spiritual man, the Christ within; and no outer earthly happenings, and no
national situations, no matter how temporarily material they may appear to be
in their objectives, can dull or obliterate the Presence of God in us. We are
learning that that Presence can be released in us only by the death of the
lower nature, and this is what Christ has always proclaimed to us from His
Cross. We are realising increasingly that the "fellowship of His
sufferings" means that we mount the Cross with Him and share constantly in
the Crucifixion experience. We are coming to the knowledge that the determining
factor in human life is love, and that "God is love." [ccviii]30
Christ came to show us that love was the motivating [201] power of the universe. He suffered and died because He
loved and cared enough for human beings to demonstrate to them the Way that
they must go—from the cave of Birth to the mount of Transfiguration, and on to
the agony of the Crucifixion—if they too are to share in the life of humanity
and become, in their turn, saviours of their fellowmen.

How then shall we define sin?
First let us look at the words which are used in the Bible and in theological
works and commentaries dealing with the theme of sin, transgression, iniquity,
evil, separation. All of these are expressions of man's relation to God and to
his fellowmen and, according to the New Testament, these terms—God and our
fellowmen—are interchangeable terms. What do these words mean?

The real meaning of the word sin
is very obscure. It signifies literally "the one who it is." [ccix]31
Literally, therefore, the one who is in existence, just in so far as he sets
himself up against the divine aspect hidden in himself, is a sinner. Some words
by Dr. Grensted are illuminating in this connection. He says:

"`Men turned away from
God,' says Athanasius, `when they began to give heed to themselves.' Augustine
identifies sin with the love of self. Dr. Williams has argued that the
underlying principle from which sin arises is to be found in `the
self-assertion of the individual against the herd, a principle which we can
only designate by the inadequate titles of selfishness, lovelessness and hate.'
And Dr. Kirk declares that `sin may be said to begin with
self-regard.'" [ccx]
32

These thoughts bring us
directly to the central problem of sin which is (in the last analysis) the
problem of man's essential duality, before he has made the at-one-ment for
which Christ stood. When man, before he awakens to his dual nature, does that
which is wrong and sinful, we cannot and do not regard him as a sinner—unless
we are old-fashioned [202] enough to believe
in the doctrine that every man is irretrievably lost unless he is
"saved" in the orthodox sense of the term. To St. James, sin is
acting against knowledge, and he says "To him that knoweth to do good, and
doeth it not, to him it is sin." [ccxi]33 There we have a real definition of
sin. It is to act against light and knowledge, and with deliberation to do that
which we know is wrong and undesirable. Where there is no such knowledge there
can be no sin; therefore animals are regarded as free from sin, and men acting
in equal ignorance should likewise be so regarded. But the moment a man becomes
aware that he is two persons in one form, that he is God and man, then
responsibility steadily increases, sin becomes possible, and it is here that
the mystery aspect of sin enters in. It consists in the relation between the
"hidden man of the heart" [ccxii]34 and the outer, tangible man. Each
has its own life and its own field of experience. Each therefore remains a
mystery to the other. The at-one-ment consists in resolving the relationship
between these two, and when the wishes of the "hidden man" are
violated, the sin occurs.

When these two aspects of man
are united and function together as a unity, and when the spiritual man
controls the activities of the carnal man, sin becomes impossible, and man
moves on towards greatness.

The word
"transgression" signifies the walking across a boundary; it involves
the displacing of a landmark, as it is called in Masonry, or the infringement
of one of the basic principles of living. There are certain things which are
recognised by all as having a controlling relation to man. Such a compilation
of principles as the Ten Commandments might be cited as a case in point. They
constitute the boundary which ancient custom, ordained right habits, and the
social order have imposed upon the race. To step across these boundaries, which
man, from experience, has himself instituted, and to which God has accorded
divine recognition, [203] is to transgress,
and for every transgression there is an inevitable penalty. We pay the price of
ignorance every time, and thereby learn not to sin; we are penalised when we do
not keep the rules, and in time we learn not to transgress them. Instinctively
we keep certain rules; probably because we have often paid the price, and
certainly because we care too much about our reputations and public opinion to
transgress them now. There are boundaries across which the average right-minded
citizen does not step. When he does, he joins the large group of sinners.
Controlled action in every department of human life is the ideal, and this
action must be based on right motive, be actuated by unselfish purpose, and be
carried forward in the strength of the inner spiritual man, the "hidden
man of the heart."

"Iniquity" is a
word with a seemingly innocuous meaning. It signifies simply an unevenness, an
inequality. An iniquitous man is therefore technically an unbalanced man, one
who tolerates some unevennesses in his daily life. A definition such as this is
broadly inclusive, and even if we do not regard ourselves as sinners and
transgressors, we surely come under the category of those whose lives show
certain inequalities in conduct. We are not always the same. We are fluid in
our expression of living. We are some days one thing and some days another, and
because of this lack of balance and of equilibrium, we are iniquitous
people in the true sense of the word. These things are good to remember, for
they prevent that dire sin, self-satisfaction.

The question of evil is too
large to elucidate at length, but it might be defined simply as adherence to
that which we should have outgrown, the grasping of that which we should have
left behind. Evil is, for the bulk of us, simply and solely an effort to
identify ourselves with the form life when we have a capacity for soul
consciousness; and righteousness is the steady turning of the thought and life
towards the soul, leading to those activities which are spiritual and harmless
and helpful. This sense of evil and this reaction to good is again latent in
the relationship between the two [204] halves
of man's nature—the spiritual and the strictly human. When we turn the light of
our awakened consciousness into the lower nature, and then with deliberation
do, "in the light," those things which are determined and vitalised
from the lower levels of our existence, we are throwing the weight of our
knowledge on the side of evil, and are retrogressing. It is not always
expedient from the point of view of the "carnal man" to do, or to
reject, certain things, and when we choose the lower, and do it, making a
specific choice, then the evil which is in us is dominating.

It is gradually dawning on
the human consciousness that a separative attitude has in it the elements of
sin and of evil. When we are separative in our attitudes or do anything which
produces separation, we are transgressing a fundamental law of God. What we are
really doing is breaking the Law of Love, which knows no separation, but sees
only unity and synthesis, brotherhood and interrelation everywhere. Herein lies
our major problem. Our study in connection with sin and evil will, as Dr.
Grensted tells us, serve....

"in the main to reveal
the fundamental character of our problem as resulting from a failure of faith
and a refusal of love. The psychologists do not escape from this view of sin
when they deal with it as moral disease, for their one hope of treating such
moral disease successfully rests in an attempt to awaken the latent personal
resources of the ego, through processes in themselves personal. Where, as in
certain of the major psychoses, this appeal cannot be made, there is no human
hope of a cure. The key to psychological healing lies in the transference
and there is the closest possible parallel between this and the Christian way
of forgiveness. Both methods are wholly personal, both depend upon a
readjustment of relationships which begins at priest or physician and passes
out into every relationship of the social environment." [Italics are mine.
A.A.B.] [ccxiii]35

The sense of responsibility
for one's actions grows as one progresses from stage to stage upon the Path of
Evolution. [205]
In the early stages there is little
or no responsibility. There is little or no knowledge, no sense of relationship
to God, and very little sense of relationship to humanity. It is this sense of
separateness, this emphasis upon personal and individual good, which is of the
nature of sin. Love is unity, at-one-ment and synthesis. Separateness is
hatred, aloneness and division. But man, being divine in nature, has to love,
and the trouble has been that he has loved wrongly. In the early stages of his
development he places his love in the wrong direction, and turning his back on
the love of God, which is of the very nature of his own soul, he loves that
which is connected with the form side of life, and not with the life side of
form.

Sin is therefore a definite
infringement of the Law of Love, as we show it in our relation with God or with
our brother, a son of God. It is the doing of those things from purely selfish
interest which brings suffering to those we have in our immediate surroundings,
or to the group with which we may be affiliated—a family group, a social group,
a business group, or just the group of human beings with whom our general
destiny casts us.

This brings us to the
realisation that, in the last analysis, sin signifies wrong relation to other
human beings. It was the sense of this wrong relation which in the early days
of man's history gave rise to the sacrifice of worldly goods upon the altar, for
primitive man seemed to feel that by making an offering to God he succeeded in
making redemption of his character possible with his fellowmen.

It is beginning to dawn upon
the race today that the only real sin is to hurt another human being. Sin is
the misuse of our relationships with each other, and there is no evading these
relationships. They exist. We live in a world of men, and our lives are spent
in contact with other human beings. The way in which we handle this daily
problem demonstrates either our divinity or our erring lower nature. Our task
in life is to express divinity. And that divinity manifests itself [206] in the same way that the divinity of Christ expressed
itself; in harmless living and ceaseless service to our fellowmen; in a careful
watchfulness over words and deeds lest in any way we should "offend one of
these little ones"; [ccxiv]36
in the sharing with Christ of the urgency which He felt to meet the world's
need and to act the part of a saviour to men. It is gloriously true that this
basic concept of Deity is beginning to grip humanity.

Christ's major task was the
establishing of God's kingdom upon earth. He showed us the way in which
humanity could enter that kingdom—by subjecting the lower nature to the death
of the cross, and rising by the power of the indwelling Christ. Each one of us
has to tread the way of the cross alone, and enter God's kingdom by right of
achievement. But the way is found in service to our fellowmen, and Christ's
death, viewed from one angle, was the logical outcome of the service which He
had rendered. Service, pain, difficulty and the cross—such are the rewards of
the man who puts humanity first and himself second. But having done so, he
discovers that the door into the kingdom is flung wide open and that he can
enter in. But he has first to suffer. It is the Way.

It is through supreme service
and sacrifice that we become followers of Christ and earn the right to enter
into His kingdom, because we do not enter alone. This is the subjective element
in all religious aspiration, and this all the sons of God have grasped and
taught. Man triumphs through death and sacrifice.

That superhuman Spirit,
Christ, did this perfectly. In Him was no sin because He had perfectly
transcended the ephemeral lower self. His personality was subordinated to His
divinity. The laws of transgression touched Him not, because He crossed no
boundaries and infringed no principles. He embodied in Himself the principle of
love and therefore it was not possible for Him, at the stage in evolution [207] which He had reached, to hurt a human being. He was
perfectly balanced and had achieved that equilibrium which released Him from
all lower impacts and set Him free to ascend to the throne of God. For Him
there was no holding on to the lower and to that which was humanly desirable
but divinely rejected. Evil therefore passed Him by, and he had no traffic with
it. "He was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without
sin." [ccxv]37
He knew no separateness. Rich men, publicans, fishermen, learned professors,
harlots and simple folk were all His friends, and the "great heresy of
separateness" was completely overcome by His all-inclusive spirit. Thus He
fulfilled the law of the past, emphasised the type for the humanity of the
future, and entered for us within the veil, leaving us an example that we
should follow His steps—an example of sacrifice unto the death, of service
rendered ceaselessly, of self-forgetfulness, and of a heroism that led Him from
point to point upon the way, and from altitude to altitude, until no bonds
could hold Him (not even the barriers of death). He remains the eternal
God-Man, the Saviour of the world. In perfection He fulfilled the will of God,
and said to us the words which give us a simple rule with a great reward:
"If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be
of God." [ccxvi]
38

The simplicity of this
instruction is almost baffling. We are told simply to do God's will and then
truth will be revealed to us. There were times in Christ's life, as in the
Garden of Gethsemane, when He fought with Himself to do God's will. There were
moments when His human flesh quailed before the prospect which opened up before
Him. He therefore knew the difficulty of this simple rule.

3

In turning our attention to
the story of the Crucifixion it is obvious that there is no need to recount the
details of it. [208]
It is so well known and so familiar
that the words in which it is couched are apt to mean little. The tale of
Christ's triumphant entry into Jerusalem, of His gathering the disciples
together into the upper room, and there sharing with them the communion of bread
and of wine and of the desertion of those who supposedly loved Him, with His
subsequent agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, is as familiar to us as our own
names, and much less arresting. That is the tragedy of Christ. He did so much,
and we have recognised so little. It has taken us twenty centuries to begin to
understand Him and His mission and career. The Crucifixion itself was only an
anticipated and expected consummation of that career. No other end was
possible. It was predetermined from the beginning, and really dated from the
time when, after the Baptism initiation, He started out to serve humanity, and
to teach and preach the good tidings of the kingdom of God. That was His theme,
and we have forgotten it and have preached the Personality of Jesus Christ—one
theme which He Himself ignored and which seemed to Him of small importance in
view of the greater values involved. This again is the tragedy of Christ. He
has one set of values and the world has another.

We have made of the
Crucifixion a tragedy, whereas the real tragedy was our failure to recognise
its true significance. The agony in the Garden of Gethsemane was based upon the
fact that He was not understood. Many men have died violent deaths. In this,
Christ was in no wise different from thousands of other far-seeing men and
reformers, down the ages. Many people have passed through the Gethsemane
experience and prayed with the same fervour as Christ that God's will might be
done. Many men have been deserted by those who might have been expected to
understand and participate in the work and service visioned. In none of these
respects was Christ really unique. But His suffering was based upon His unique
vision. The lack of comprehension of the people, and the distorted
interpretations which future theologians would give to His message must surely
have been a part of [209] the pre-vision,
as likewise the knowledge that the emphasis accorded to Him as the Saviour of
the world would retard for centuries the materialising of the kingdom of God on
earth, which it was His mission to found. Christ came that all mankind might
have "life ... more abundantly." [ccxvii]39 We
have so interpreted His words that only the "saved" are credited with
having taken the necessary steps towards that life. But the abundant life is
surely not a life to be lived hereafter, in some distant heaven where those who
are believers shall enjoy an exclusive life of happiness, whilst the rest of
God's children are left outside. The Cross was intended to indicate the line of
demarcation between the kingdom of men and the kingdom of God, between one
great kingdom in nature which had reached maturity, and another kingdom in
nature which could now enter upon its cycle of activity. The human kingdom had
evolved to the point where it had produced the Christ and those other children
of God whose lives bore constant testimony to the divine nature.

Christ assumed the ancient
symbol and burden of the cross, and, taking His stand beside all the previous
crucified Saviours, embodied in Himself the immediate and the cosmic, the past
and the future, rearing the Cross on the hill outside Jerusalem (the name of
which signifies the "vision of peace"), thus calling attention to the
kingdom which He died to establish. The work had been completed, and in that
strange little country called the Holy Land, a narrow strip of territory
between the two hemispheres, the East and the West, the Orient and the
Occident, Christ mounted the Cross and fixed the boundary between the kingdom
of God and the kingdoms of the world, between the world of men and the world of
Spirit. Thus He brought to a climax the ancient Mysteries, which had prophesied
the coming of that kingdom, and instituted the Mysteries of the kingdom of God.

The effort to carry out to
perfection the will of God brought to an end the most complete life that had
been lived on earth. The attempt to found the kingdom, preordained [210] for all time, and the antagonism it evoked, brought
Christ to the place of crucifixion. The hardness of men's hearts, the weakness
of their love, and their failure to see the vision, broke the heart of the
Saviour of the world—a Saviour because He opened the door into the kingdom.

It is time that the Church
woke up to its true mission, which is to materialise the kingdom of God on
earth, today, here and now. The time is past wherein we can emphasise a future
and coming kingdom. People are no longer interested in a possible heavenly
state or a probable hell. They need to learn that the kingdom is here, and must
express itself on earth; it consists of those who do the will of God at any
cost, as Christ did, and who can love one another as Christ loved us. The way
into that kingdom is the way that Christ trod. It involves the sacrifice of the
personal self for the good of the world, and the service of humanity instead of
the service of one's own desires. In the course of enunciating these new truths
concerning love and service Christ lost his life. Canon Streeter tells us that
"the significance and value of the death of Christ springs from its inner
quality. It is the expression in external act of a freely chosen
self-dedication, ungrudging, and without reserve, to the highest service of God
and man. The suffering incidental to such self-offering is morally
creative." [ccxviii]
40

Is it not, perhaps, a fact
that the Crucifixion of Christ, with its great preceding events—the communion
and the Gethsemane experience—is a tragedy which has its basis in the conflict
between love and hate? It is not the intention of this book to belittle the
world event which took place upon Calvary. But today as one looks back upon
that event, a certain truth begins to emerge, and this is that we have interpreted
that sacrifice and that death in purely selfish terms. We are concerned with
our individual interest in the matter. We have emphasised the importance of our
individual salvation and feel it to be of tremendous importance. But the world
view and what Christ was destined to [211] do for
humanity down the ages, and the attitude of God towards human beings from the
earliest times, through the period of Christ's life in Palestine and on until
the present time, are subordinated to the factor of our belief or non-belief in
the efficacy of the Crucifixion upon Calvary to save our individual souls. Yet
in His conversation with the repentant thief Christ admitted him into the
kingdom of God on the basis of his recognition of divinity. Christ had not yet
died, and the blood sacrifice of Christ had not yet been made. It was almost as
if Christ had foreseen the turn which theology would give to His death, and
endeavoured to offset it by making the recognition of the dying thief one of
the outstanding events at His death. He made no reference to the remission of
sins through His blood as the reason for that admission.

The real issue was the issue
between love and hate. Only St. John, the beloved Apostle, the one closest to
Jesus, really understood; and in his Epistles the emphasis is entirely upon
love, and the usual orthodox interpretation is nowhere to be found. Just love
and hate; the desire to live as children of God and the inclination to live as
ordinary human beings: herein lies the distinction between the citizen of the
kingdom of God and a member of the human family. It was love which Christ
endeavoured to express, but it is hate and separation and war, culminating in
the World War, which have characterised the official rendering of His teaching,
down the age. Christ died in order to bring to our notice that the way into the
kingdom of God was the way of love and of service. He served and loved and
wrought miracles, and gathered together the poor and the hungry. He fed them,
and sought in every possible way to call attention to the principle of love as
the major characteristic of divinity, only to find that this life of loving
service brought Him trouble and eventually the death of the Cross.

We have fought for the
theological doctrine of the Virgin Birth. We have fought over the doctrines
whereby men shall be saved. We have fought over the subject of baptism, and [212] over the atonement. We have fought over the fact and
the denial of immortality, and what man must do in order to be raised from the
dead. We have regarded half the world as lost and only the Christian believer
as saved, yet all the time Christ has told us that love is the way into the
kingdom, and that the fact of the presence of divinity in each of us makes us
eligible for that kingdom. We have omitted to realise that the "vicarious
atonement is the harmonising of the disharmony of others by the power of a
spiritual presence, which brings about the great transmutation; evil is
absorbed and transmuted into good or equilibrised." [ccxix]41 This
constitutes the endeavour of Christ, and the fact of His Presence is the
harmonising medium in life. Men are not saved by belief in the formulation
of a theological dogma, but by the fact of His living Presence, of the living
immediate Christ. It is the realisation of the fact of the presence of God
in the human heart which is the basis of the mystical vision, while the
knowledge that one is a son of God gives one the strength to follow the
Saviour's footsteps from Bethlehem to Calvary. That which will eventually
reorganise our human life is the presence in the world of those who know Christ
as their example, and recognise that they possess the same divine life, just as
the affirmation of the basic law of the kingdom of God, the Law of Love, will
finally save the world. It is the substitution of the life of Christ for the
life of the world, the flesh and the devil, which will inject a meaning and a
value into life.

A sense of the failure of
love constitutes the outstanding problem in the agony in the Garden; it was
this sense of travail with world forces which enabled Christ to join the
company of all His brothers. Men had failed Him, just as men fail us. In the
moment when He most needed understanding, and all the strength which
companionship gives, His nearest and dearest either deserted Him or slept,
unaware of His agony of mind. "The Promethean conflict is the [213] strife which takes place in the human mind between the
yearning for understanding, and the nearer more immediate pull of those living
affections and desires which are conditioned upon the goodwill and the support
of fellow beings; desires for the happiness of loved ones; for the alleviation
of pain and disappointment in minds that cannot understand the inner dream; and
for the warm reassurance of mundane honours. This conflict is the rock upon
which the religious mind founders and is split against itself." [ccxx]42
Upon this rock Christ did not founder, but He had His moments of intensest
agony, finding relief only in the realisation of the Fatherhood of God and its
corollary, the brotherhood of man. "Father," He said. It was this
sense of unity with God and His fellowmen which led Him to institute the Last
Supper, to originate that communion service, the symbolism of which has been so
disastrously lost in theological practice. The keynote of that communion
service was fellowship. "It is only thus that Jesus creates fellowship
among us. It is not as a symbol that he does it ... in so far as we with one
another and with him are of one will, to place the Kingdom of God above all,
and to serve in behalf of this faith and hope, so far is there fellowship
between him and us and the men of all generations who lived and live in the
same thought." [ccxxi]
43

The thought of the kingdom
coloured all that He said upon the Cross. The Word of Power which emanated from
the Cross was spoken by Jesus Christ Himself and not, this time, by the Father.
Christ spoke a sevenfold word, and in that word summed up for us the Word that
inaugurated the kingdom of God. Each of His utterances had relation to that
kingdom, and not the usual small, individual or selfish relation which we have
so often ascribed to them. What were those seven words? Let us consider them,
realising while doing so that the causes which gave rise to them produced the
manifestation of the kingdom of God on earth.

In every case the seven words
have been interpreted as having either an individual application in connection
with the person to whom they were supposedly spoken, or as having a personal
significance to Christ Himself. We have always read the Bible in this manner,
with the personal significance in our minds. But these words of Christ are of
too great importance to be thus interpreted. They have a meaning far wider than
those usually given. The wonder of all He said (as it is the wonder of all the
world scriptures) is that the words are capable of various meanings. The time
has come when the meaning that Christ gave should be more generally understood
by us in the light of the kingdom of God, and with a wider connotation than the
individual one. His words were Words of Power, evoking and invoking, potent and
dynamic.

One of the first things which
emerges in one's consciousness as one studies the first word from the Cross was
the fact that Jesus requested His Father to forgive the people who crucified
Him; He evidently, then, did not regard His death upon the Cross as adequate to
that need. There was [215] no remission of
sins through the shedding of blood; but there was the need to ask God's pardon
for the sin committed. The two facts which come to the fore in this word are
the Fatherhood of God, and the fact that ignorance, if productive of
wrong-doing, does not make a man guilty and therefore punishable. Sin and
ignorance are frequently synonymous terms, but the sin is recognised as such by
those who know and who are not ignorant. Where there is ignorance there is no
sin. In this word from the Cross Christ tells us two things:

1. That God is our Father,
and that we approach Him through Christ. It is the inner hidden man of the
heart, the unrealised Christ who can approach the Father. Christ had earned
this right because of His proven divinity and because He had passed through the
third initiation, the Transfiguration; when we too are transfigured (for only
the transfigured Christ can be crucified) then we too can invoke the Father and
call on the spirit, which is God, the life of all forms, to adjust
relationships, and to bring about that forgiveness which is the very essence of
life itself.

2. That forgiveness is the
result of life. This is a hard truth for the Western believer to accept. He is
so used to resting back upon the activity of the Christ in the distant past.
Forgiveness is, however, a result of living processes which bring adjustment,
cause restitution, and produce that attitude wherein a man is no longer
ignorant and therefore not in need of forgiveness. Life and experience do this
for us, and nothing can arrest the process. It is not a theological belief that
puts us right with God, but an attitude to life and an attitude to the Christ
dwelling in the human heart. We learn through pain and suffering (that is,
through experience) not to sin. We pay the price of our sins and mistakes, and
cease to make them. We arrive eventually at the point where we no longer make
our earlier errors or commit our former sins. For we suffer and agonise, and
learn that sin brings retribution and causes suffering. But suffering [216] has its uses, as Christ knew. In His Person He was not
only the historical Jesus Whom we know and love, but He was also the symbol to
us of the cosmic Christ, God suffering through the sufferings of His created
beings.

Justice can be forgiveness
when the facts of the case are rightly understood, and in this demand of the
crucified Saviour we have the recognition of the Law of Justice, and not that
of Retribution, in an act at which the whole world stands aghast. This work of
forgiveness is the age-long work of the soul in matter or form. The Oriental
believer calls this karma. The Western believer talks of the Law of
Cause and Effect. Both, however, are dealing with the working out by a man of
his soul's salvation, and the constant paying of the price which the ignorant
pay for mistakes made and so-called sins committed. A man who deliberately sins
against light and knowledge is rare. Most "sinners" are simply
ignorant. "They know not what they do."

Then Christ turned to a
sinner, to a man who had been convicted of wrong-doing in the eyes of the
world—and who himself recognised the correctness of the judgment and of his
punishment. He stated that he received the due reward of his sins, but at the
same time there was something in the quality of Jesus which arrested his
attention and forced from him the admission that this third Malefactor had
"done nothing amiss." The factor which accorded him admission into
paradise was a two-fold one. He recognised the divinity of Christ.
"Lord," he said. And he also had a realisation of what Christ's
mission was—to found a kingdom. "Remember me when Thou comest into Thy
kingdom." The significance of his words is eternal and universal, for the
man who recognises divinity, and who at the same time is sensible of the
kingdom, is ready to take advantage of the words, "To day, thou shalt be
with me in paradise."

In the first word from the
Cross, Jesus considered the ignorance and the feebleness of man. He was as
helpless as a little child, and in His words He testified to the reality of the
first initiation and to the time when He was a "babe in [217] Christ." The parallels between the two episodes
are significant. The ignorance, helplessness and consequent maladjustment of
human beings evoked from Jesus the demand that forgiveness be accorded. But
when life experience has played its part, we have again the "babe in
Christ," ignorant of the laws of the spiritual kingdom, yet released from
the darkness and ignorance of the human kingdom.

In the second word from the
Cross we have the recognition of the Baptism episode, which signified purity
and release through the purification of the waters of life. The waters of
John's Baptism released from the thraldom of the personality life. But the
Baptism to which Christ was subjected through the power of His Own life, and to
which we are also subjected through the life of Christ within us, was the
Baptism of fire and of suffering, which finds its climax of pain upon the
Cross. That climax of suffering, for the man who could endure unto the end, was
his entrance to "paradise"—a name connoting bliss. Three words are
used to express this power to enjoy—happiness, joy and bliss. Happiness
has a purely physical connotation, and concerns our physical life and its
relationships; joy is of the nature of the soul and reflects itself in
happiness. But bliss, which is of the nature of God Himself, is an
expression of divinity and of the spirit. Happiness might be regarded as the
reward of the new birth, for it has a physical significance, and we are sure
that Christ knew happiness, even though He was a "man of sorrows";
joy, being more especially of the soul, reaches its consummation at the
Transfiguration. Though Christ was "acquainted with sorrow," He knew
joy in its essence, for the "joy of the Lord is our strength," and it
is the soul, the Christ in every human being, which is strength and joy and
love. He knew also bliss, for at the Crucifixion the bliss which is the reward
of the soul's triumph was His.

Thus in these two Words of
Power "Father, forgive them for they know not what they do," and
"To day thou shalt be with me in paradise," we have the significances
of the first two initiations summarised for us.

[218]

Now we come to the
extraordinary and much debated episode between Christ and His mother, summed up
in the words: "Woman, behold thy son," and followed by the words
spoken to the beloved apostle: "Behold thy mother." What did these
words mean? Below Christ stood the two people who meant the most to Him, and
from the agony of the Cross He spoke to them a special message, relating them
to each other. Our consideration of the previous initiations may make the
meaning clear. John typifies the personality which is reaching perfection and
whose nature is becoming irradiated by divine love, the major characteristic of
the second Person of the divine Triplicity, the soul, the son of God, whose
nature is love. As we have seen, Mary represents the third Person of the
Trinity, the material aspect of nature which cherishes and nurtures the son and
gives birth to him in Bethlehem. In these words Christ, utilising the symbolism
of these two persons, relates them to each other, and practically says: Son,
recognise who is to give thee birth at Bethlehem, the one who shelters and
guards the Christ life. To His mother, He says: Recognise that in the developed
personality there is latent the Christ child. Matter, or the virgin Mary, is
glorified through her son. Therefore the words of Christ have a definite
reference to the third initiation, that of the Transfiguration.

Thus in His first three Words
from the Cross He refers to the first three initiations, and recalls to our
minds the synthesis revealed in Himself and the stages which we must cover if
we are to follow in His steps. It is possible also that the thought was in the
consciousness of the crucified Saviour that matter itself, being divine, was
capable of infinite suffering; and in these words there was wrung from Him the
recognition that though God suffers in the Person of His Son, He also suffers
with similar acute agony in the person of that Son's mother, the material form
which has given Him birth. Christ stands midway between the two—the mother and
the Father. Therein is His problem, and therein is [219] found the problem of every human being. Christ draws
the two together—the matter aspect and the spirit aspect, and the union of
these two produces the son. This is humanity's problem and humanity's
opportunity.

The fourth Word from the
Cross admits us into one of the most intimate moments of Christ's life—a moment
that has a definite relation to the kingdom, just as had the three previous
Words. One always hesitates to intrude upon this episode in His life, because
it is one of the deepest and most secret and perhaps most sacred phases of His
life on earth. We read that there was "darkness on the face of the
earth" for three hours. This is a most significant interlude. From the
Cross, alone and in the dark, He symbolised all that was embodied in this
tragic and agonised Word. The number three is, of course, one of the most important
and sacred numbers. It stands for divinity, and also for perfected humanity.
Christ, the perfect Man, hung upon the Cross for "three hours," and
in that time each of the three aspects of His nature was carried to the highest
point of its capacity for realisation and for consequent suffering. At the end,
this triple personality gave vent to the cry, "My God, my God, why hast
thou forsaken me?"